PolitiCook.net

Random Thoughts on Us (the community) and Monitors

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

This is not written so much for us as for the much larger Kos community. But as we expand, it might be well to review.

This may be a bit disjointed, since I just ate a big plateful of fried okra, and that always puts me in a good mood. If you do not know about it, you should introduce yourself to it.

NOT the kind that comes in a bag in a freezer at the store. The kind that you have to cut from your own plants at least every other day.

It is wonderful, but now for more random thoughts.

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Food News Roundup: The Cheery Edition

It’s not all doom and gloom, not just yet! I know I tend to report the bad news like a broken record, but believe me, it’s because it is bad, and with peak oil, water & food shortages, overpopulation…and the dopey monkey still in the WH, it doesn’t augur well, and I haven’t even mentioned Global Warming! Some posters went as far to suggest that being in the richest and mightiest country in the world, not much will happen to the food chain. Well, if you’re the head of Exxon or somewhere in that super rich league, yes, you’ll still have plenty to eat, but for the rest of us, the hoi polloi, we’ll have to find interesting ways to make ends meet within the next two decades.

Scouring the “Internets”, I have come up with news that are mostly good news. Not many but then again, I never promised you a rose garden. Read more »

Food Irradiation and Vitamin Loss

In 2007, Indian mangoes made their first trip in 18 years to the United States. While the U.S. government hailed the fact that irradiation had been used to kill any pests that might have been living in or on the fruit before its overseas ride, consumers should question how exposing mangoes to high levels of ionizing radiation affects the nutritional quality of the fruit. During storage, for example, irradiated mangoes can lose more than half of their vitamin C. Watch for that misleading green logo, if you see it on fruit or vegetable, don’t buy it.

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Olive Oil Anyone?

Consuming a traditional Mediterranean diet, rich in fruit, vegetables, olive oil and fish, may reduce the risk of developing diabetes by a whopping 83 per cent, says a new study. Interestingly, people who adhered strictly to the diet were also found to have the highest prevalence of risk factors for diabetes such as older age, a family history of diabetes, and a higher proportion of ex-smokers. Despite being expected to have the higher incidence of diabetes, but this was not the case.

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Wastrels

In today’s world, where so many wake up in poverty and go to sleep hungry, each of us should ask: “how can I change this?” It is a sin to waste food while others do not have enough to eat. Every year the food waste in America alone can feed over 50 million people per year. Another example: if a farmer grows 100,000 pounds of tomatoes, usually about half of them (50,000 lbs) must be thrown away. This is because if a tomato is slightly misshapen, discolored, too small (or too big), or blemished in any way, it will not meet the consumer demand for a “perfect” tomato and will therefore be rejected.

This is true for many fruit and vegetable crops. To prevent trucks of produce from being rejected, crops are “culled” (hand sorted) after they are picked. About half goes into the truck on its way to the store. The other half goes into the truck going to the dump, or destined to be plowed under and sprayed with insecticide. The food being thrown away is not rotten or bad in any way.

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The Hungry Look Towards Rome for Answers

The primaries are over! Now is the time to solve the real problems as world leaders gather in Rome for the second day of talks on food price escalation and, with luck, to settle on a common strategy to deal with the crisis, the FAO has put a price on eradicating hunger: $30bn. Yep! That’s for one year.

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Food Complacency

This is meant to be highlighting the opening of the Rome Food Conference today. For far too long, we in the developed world have taken food supplies for granted. For decades, ample food stocks, a well-supplied export trade and rapidly rising agricultural productivity seemed to have confined food “insecurity”, in the west at least, to the history bin. Cause and effect: it has proved a costly complacency, the scale of which we are only just beginning to realize (latest diaries here, here and here). Have we forgotten the European famines of the war years, the end of British food rationing in 1953, and the US food shortages of the 1930s?

I’m eagerly awaiting the findings of the Food Summit in Rome (which starts today) organized by the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) though mixed signals have already been sent by same agency: Food prices to remain high despite higher output. Read more »

Speculators Pushing Up Food Prices?

My email box this morning bristled with an inordinate amount of messages from various food agencies but the one that I opened up straight away came from the FAO, with a link to their latest pdf prepared & published for next week’s high level conference on world food security in Rome. Speculators outside of the food industry pouring money into financial mechanisms in the commodity markets could be cause for concern.

In a far-reaching report on global food prices, the UN questions the contribution of institutional investors to the recent turmoil in commodity markets.

“A key concern now is the participation of new agents that are perceived to be motivated by risk-diversification to the exclusion of serious assessment of price levels.”

A month ago I wrote a diary which, gasp, dared to suggest that indeed there was a tidal wave of investors and speculators pouring into the futures markets for corn, wheat, rice and other commodities and who were driving up prices. Read more »

Food News Roundup

I’ve been addicted to comestibles and their “relatives” since childhood. That’s the price I was glad to pay being from a family of hoteliers and restaurateurs. At the tender age of seven I was taught how to differentiate a Burgundy from a Claret, and all my spare time was spent in the hotel kitchens, spying on the chefs, pestering all and sundry with endless questioning, poking my nose into this and that, checking out all the incoming supplies. My hard copy files, collected over the last thirty years or so, run into thousands of pages, and since the advent of the “internets”, I have now several hundreds of thousands more, being subscribed to email alerts from all kinds of sites that are connected to food & beverages producers and odds and sods.

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GM Sugar: Another Threat from Monsanto

Look out for genetically modified sugar in a shopping aisle near you by next Fall! American Crystal, a large Wyoming-based sugar company, has announced it will be sourcing its sugar from genetically engineered sugar beets.

However, the increasing presence of GM crops in the US food chain has led to a growing resistance movement. Several activists groups have filed lawsuits in California calling for the USDA to review its approval of the GM sugar beet, while planting of Monsanto’s alfalfa, also genetically modified to resist Roundup, has been delayed after a major campaign against the crop in 2006 calling for a federal environmental review.

GMO sugar beet seeds, supplied by Monsanto, have an inserted gene to make the plant resistant to the company’s Roundup herbicide. Monsanto already once postponed intro of the sugar beet (ready since 2004) when candy makers and other companies fretted - rightly so - that consumers would reject products with sugar from the beets. Read more »